I don’t
remember how old I was when I had my first encounter with pornography, but I must have
been around 10 – the experience is entwined with the sound of the AOL dial-up
tone. It was something relatively benign – a close-up photo of some genitalia –
and I wasn’t much shocked. I grew up in a family not given to sugarcoating the
realities of the human condition and I’d known what to expect.

But what if
I’d grown up a decade or so later, when the internet had graduated beyond the
old-school chatrooms and into the ubiquitous juggernaut of today? My memory
might have been decidedly different.

‘The
widespread use of internet porn is one of the fastest-moving global experiments
ever unconsciously conducted,’ the US science writer Gary Wilson told a TEDx
audience in 2012 [See video below]. For the first time ever, Wilson explained, we can track how
ever-growing exposure to pornography affects sexual practices, appetites and
trends. Wilson – who is neither a scientist nor a professor – is the founder of
Your Brain On Porn, a site that popularises anti-pornography research. In his
talk, he reiterated the site’s main conclusions: when we have pornography
freely available at our fingertips, the brain’s reward circuits go into
overdrive as they’re exposed to what he terms ‘extreme versions of natural events’.
Instead of one or two possible sexual partners, now there are dozens, hundreds,
all readily accessible in a single click. Like any addiction, Wilson says, the
result is a numbed response to pleasure, from lack of interest in real women to
erectile dysfunction. Ubiquitous pornography undermines natural sexuality.

Wilson’s
talk has had approximately 4.6 million views – and its popularity heralds a new
movement in pornography consumption: NoFap. ‘Fap’ comes from Japanese manga
porn, where it is a sound effect for masturbation. NoFap is a move away from
masturbation, and the pornography that so often forms its backdrop. The
rationale derives from a version of Wilson’s argument: when you are constantly
bombarded with heightened sexual stimuli, your virility is undermined. Your
ability to communicate with real sexual beings collapses. You become isolated –
porn, after all, is a solitary pursuit – and your emotional wellbeing plummets.
Refrain from those stimuli, and from acting on them, and you will find yourself
rejuvenated and your sexual powers reawakened, your emotional equilibrium
restored and your happiness rising. When Wilson’s talk was first released, the
self-styled ‘Fapstronauts’ numbered approximately 7,000. Today, there are more
than 150,000.

The NoFap,
brain-on-porn arguments are the latest in a common, critical refrain: that, for
one reason or another, pornography is bad for you. The more traditional
critiques say that pornography is inherently degrading to women – or whoever
happens to be the object of sexual activity – and fosters unrealistic
expectations of sex. It decreases the quality of real relationships and the
self-image of those involved – and increases negative sexual attitudes and
actions. Porn-users compare real humans to the fantastical images, and either
come out unimpressed and reluctant to have real sex, or, at worst, demanding
the types of behaviours they see on screen, regardless of their desirability to
their partner. One poll from the US Pew Research Center in 2007 quantified the
feeling, finding that 70 per cent of Americans said pornography is harmful.

Do any of
these criticisms hold water? It would be nice to know. Reliable statistics
about pornography are notoriously difficult to obtain – many people underreport
their own habits, and many porn companies are loath to share any sort of
viewership statistics. But according to ongoing research by Chyng Sun, a
professor of media studies at New York University (NYU), the numbers are high
and rising quickly. She estimates that 36 per cent of internet content is
pornography. One in four internet searches are about porn.

There are 40
million (and growing) regular consumers of porn in the US; and around the
world, at any given time, 1.7 million users are streaming porn. Of the almost
500 men Sun surveyed in one of her studies, only 1 per cent had never seen
porn, and half had seen their first porn film before they’d turned 13. Cindy
Gallop, the founder of the website Make Love Not Porn, told me recently that,
in the past six months, the average age when children are first exposed to
pornography dropped from eight to six. It wasn’t a deliberate seeking. Online
pornography is now so widespread that it’s easier than ever to ‘stumble’ on it.

The actual
effects of pornography on attitudes, behaviour, life and relationship
satisfaction are difficult to study, and for many years most data have remained
purely correlational or anecdotal. But early on, there emerged suggestive
inklings that those who vocally opposed pornography’s spread might be motivated
more by emotion than any tangible proof.

In 1969,
Denmark became the first country to legalise pornography. In the years that
followed, onlookers watched with interest and trepidation: what would happen to
Danish society? As it turns out, nothing – or rather, nothing negative. When in
1991 Berl Kutchinsky, a criminologist at the University of Copenhagen who spent
his career studying the public effects of pornography, analysed the data for
more than 20 years following legalisation, he found that rates of sexual
aggression had actually fallen. Pornography was proliferating, but the sexual
climate seemed to be improving. The same thing happened, he found, in Sweden
and West Germany, which followed Denmark’s legalisation campaign.

Kutchinsky
concluded that the available country-level data ‘would seem to exclude, beyond
any reasonable doubt, that this availability [of pornography] has had any
detrimental effects in the form of increased sexual violence… the remarkable
fact is that they decreased’ – a conclusion that has since been echoed by
multiple studies of country-level data, from nations spanning North and South
America, Europe and Asia. If anything, Kutchnisky wrote, pornography was being
used precisely as it was originally intended: as an expression of a certain
fantasy.

When it
comes to porn, going beyond correlational evidence can be difficult. ‘Science
is so scared of pornography and sexuality, and it’s so discriminated against,
that there’s a ton of work that hasn’t been done,’ Nicole Prause, head of the
Sexual Psychophysiology and Affective Neuroscience Lab at the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA), recently told me. ‘Most of the information we
currently have is not experimental or longitudinal. Lots of data talk about
correlates and associations, but the literature is especially bad – it can’t be
trusted – because no one is doing experiments, no one is showing cause and
effect. That needs to change.’

Prause fell
into sex research by mistake: she followed a boyfriend to Indiana and found
herself next to the Kinsey Institute, which happened to have an opening for a
researcher. Soon, she was hooked. Today, Prause has become one of the few
researchers in the US to study pornography in the laboratory. A trained
neuroscientist, she focuses much of her efforts on the brain. Using fMRI, PET
and EEG, Prause looks at how we respond to pornography – and how those
responses translate to attitudes and behaviour. She has found that, in many
ways, pornography is no different to a scary movie or a bungee jump. We just
view it differently because it happens to involve sex. ‘There is a general idea
that porn is special or unique in the brain. But frankly, it doesn’t look that
different from other rewards,’ she says. ‘Lots of other things are as powerful.
For someone with lower sex drive, for instance, watching porn evokes the same
magnitude response as eating chocolate, in similar brain areas.’

What’s more,
it doesn’t seem to be the case that people become desensitised to pornography,
in the sense that the more you watch it, the more extreme your viewing content
needs to become. When Prause and the psychologist James Pfaus of Concordia
University in Quebec recently measured sexual arousal in 280 men, they found
that watching more pornography actually increased arousal to less explicit
material – and increased the desire for sex with a partner. In other words, it
made them more, not less responsive to ‘normal’ cues, and more, not less,
desirous of real physical relationships. In a 2014 review, Prause likened
pornography addiction – the notion that, like a drug, the more you watch, the
more, and higher doses, you crave – to the emperor who has no clothes: everyone
says it’s there, but there is no actual evidence to support it.

Prause has
also studied the question of relationship satisfaction more directly: did
watching pornography negatively impact the quality of sexual intimacy? Working
with the psychologist Cameron Staley of Idaho State University in 2013, she
asked 44 monogamous couples to watch pornography alone and together, to see how
it would affect feelings about their relationship. After each viewing session,
the couples reported on their arousal, sexual satisfaction, perception of
themselves, and their partner’s attractiveness and sexual behaviour. Prause and
Staley found that viewing pornography increased couples’ desire to be with
their significant other, whether they’d seen the film alone or together.
Pornography also increased their evaluation of their own sexual behaviour.

In the past decade,
experimental approaches such as Prause’s have finally started to grow in number
– and for the most part, their conclusions cast doubt on the perceived social
wisdom of pornography’s detrimental impact. As part of the 2002 Swiss
Multicenter Adolescent Survey on Health, more than 7,500 16- to 20-year-olds
were asked about their exposure to online pornography (over three-quarters of
the males and 36 per cent of the females had viewed internet porn in the past
month) and then measured on a variety of behaviours and attitudes. The
researchers found no association between viewing explicit material and then
going on to behave in more sexually risky ways. A 2012 review of studies that,
since 2005, have looked at the effects of internet porn on adolescents’ social
development and attitudes found that the prevailing wisdom that pornography
leads to unrealistic sexual beliefs, more permissive attitudes and more
experimentation is not founded on replicable research. ‘The aggregate
literature has failed to indicate conclusive results,’ the authors conclude in
the journal Sexual Addiction and Compulsivity.

Likewise
with sexually violent behaviours or negative attitudes toward women. In one
series of experiments conducted by the sexologist Milton Diamond of the
University of Hawaii, viewing pornography neither made men more violent nor
more prone to having worse attitudes toward women. In a 2013 study of 4,600 15-
to 25-year-olds in the Netherlands, the psychologist Gert Martin Hald looked to
see whether pornography-viewing had an effect on a wide variety of sexual
behaviours, such as likelihood of adventurous sex (threesomes, same-sex
partners for self-stated heterosexuals, sex with someone you met online, etc),
partner experience (one-night stands, age of first encounter, number of
partners, etc), and transactional sex (being paid money or something else for
sex, paying someone else for sex). He found that frequency of
pornography-consumption did indeed have an effect – but, once you controlled
for other things, such as socio-demographic factors, risk-seeking, and social
relationships, it explained only an additional 0.3 to 4 per cent of the impact.
We shouldn’t dismiss the effect, Hald says, but rather understand it in
context: it is one of many factors, each of which contributes to behaviour, and
its influence is not any greater (and often, less) than that of other
predisposing elements.

The negative behaviours we blame on
pornography might have emerged no matter what: porn is more symptom than cause

Indeed, in
another study earlier this year, Hald and the psychologist Neil Malamuth of
UCLA looked at the relationship between negative attitudes toward women and
pornography use. They found that there was, in fact, a link – but only if a
person was already low on a scale of so-called agreeableness. Those results
came as no surprise: in 2012, they, along with the clinical psychologist Mary
Koss of the University of Arizona, found that the only time pornography viewing
was associated with attitudes that condoned any form of violence against women
was in men already at high risk of sexual aggression. When they summarised the
data that preceded their work, they wrote that negative effects ‘are evidence
only for a subgroup of males users, namely those already predisposed to sexual
aggression’. The negative behaviours we blame on pornography, in other words,
might have emerged no matter what; porn is perhaps more symptom than cause.

It’s a
message that new research is increasingly supporting. Earlier this year, a
group from VU University Amsterdam in the Netherlands attempted to disambiguate
cause and effect in relationship satisfaction: did frequent pornography viewing
cause people to drift apart – or was it the result of their having drifted
apart already? For three years, the psychologist Linda Muusses and her
colleagues tracked just under 200 newlywed couples, as part of a broader study
on marriage and wellbeing. At regular intervals, both members of every couple
were asked about their use of ‘explicit internet material’, as well as their
happiness with the relationship and their sexual satisfaction. The happier men
were in relationships, they found, the less pornography they watched.
Conversely, more viewing predicted lower happiness a year later. It was a
self-reinforcing cycle: get caught in a good one, with a satisfied
relationship, and porn was a non-issue. But lose satisfaction, watch more porn,
and realise your relationship is further disintegrating.

Muusses and
her colleagues also noticed that higher levels of pornography use at the start
of a relationship did not predict a less sexually satisfying experience later
on, for men or women. ‘Our findings suggest that it is implausible that SEIM
[sexually explicit internet material] causes husbands to contrast their sexual
experiences and partner’s attractiveness with their SEIM experiences with
long-lasting effects,’ the authors wrote.

Why, then, does the
disconnect persist between theory, opinion and social sentiment, on the one
hand, and empirical research, on the other? Part of the problem stems from the
difficulty of saying exactly what pornography actually is. The deeper I
ventured into the world of pornography, online or not, speaking with producers,
viewers, distributors, the stars themselves, the more I realised how misplaced
the very premise of that framing was: there isn’t a monolithic ‘pornography’,
just like there isn’t a monolithic ‘Hollywood film’. When we go to the cinema,
there are dramas and comedies, horror and sci-fi, thrillers and romantic romps
– movies to suit any mood, any taste, any occasion. The experience and effects
of each differ. We don’t emerge from Selma in the same frame of mind as
we do from When Harry Met Sally. But while we understand that implicitly
when it comes to mainstream cinema, we don’t see pornography with the same
level of nuance. ‘We cherry-pick the worst, most aggressive examples,’ said the
media researcher Chyng Sun.

I heard the
same refrain over and over, from every researcher and every member of the
pornography industry I spoke with: pornography is to sex as Hollywood films are
to real life. Pornography is fantasy, pure and simple. And just as any fantasy
can be channelled in any direction, so too can pornography. There are bad
fantasies – Sun’s ‘worst, most aggressive examples’, just as there are good
fantasies, instances of pornography that should pass any feminist’s muster,
both in terms of quality and the ethical standards of filming. As Coyote Amrich
of Good Vibrations, an adult retailer in San Francisco (one of the oldest such
retailers in the country) puts it: ‘Just like not everyone is a Bernie Madoff
in finance, not every person involved in porn is this terrible person. Some are
really great and have allowed incredible content and have been supportive of
male and female performers, and help people make great careers.’

That short
description goes to the heart of what makes pornography the kind of fantasy we
can feel good about versus the kind we should actively question. It’s not a
question of content but rather one of ethics, where the number-one criterion is
the treatment of the actors. ‘Are the women enjoying themselves and having
authentic pleasure as far as we can tell? Are the other people in the scene
with them not saying debasing things to them or, if they are, is it clear that
it’s wanted – yes, I want you to call me a slut, so call me a slut?’
Amrich explained. It matters little what acts are being performed or how; we
shouldn’t be quick to dismiss something as bad just because we, personally,
don’t think anyone could possibly enjoy it. What matters is that the people
performing these acts enjoy their performance. As Jamie Martin, who previously
worked with Amrich at Good Vibes, put it: ‘If it’s not hurting anyone, and
someone is going to get off on it, why not?’

Amrich
refuses to stock any films where the ethical treatment of actors isn’t
completely clear, a stance I saw from multiple buyers, distributors and
retailers. Increasingly, people insist that the product they host on their site
or bring to their customers comes from a place of clear desire. Not all porn is
created equal. ‘We need to move past the notion that a female performer is a
victim. It’s antiquated,’ Amrich says. ‘It doesn’t acknowledge female power,
pleasure, women taking control of sexuality. It only serves the idea that a
woman who is sexual is being taken advantage of.’

Jiz Lee,
recognised as one of the leading modern genderqueer adult performers, has been
in the industry for more than 10 years, and says ethical pornography is a
priority. The single biggest marker of such porn is that it costs the consumer
something. ‘By paying for it, it’s a guarantee,’ Lee told me, taking a break
from shooting with the director Shine Louise Houston. ‘Otherwise, it can be
hard to tell if it was ethically shot. Paying helps insure it, and helps the
company be in good standing.’ These days, they point out, the internet doesn’t
just function as a way to distribute pornography; it’s a way of gauging quality
and blacklisting those sites that don’t meet certain standards. ‘I won’t work
for a company that has a poor record or is exploitative,’ Lee says. ‘And I will
tell everybody else.’

In the absence of other options, pornography
becomes a de facto way
of educating yourself about sexuality

Ethical
pornography is becoming increasingly less exceptional. The porn industry of
today is a far cry from the ‘San Pornando Valley’ adult entertainment industry
of the 1990s. There are more women in charge, more readily enforced standards,
and more accountability.

But
regardless of what pornography insiders say, for consumers, especially younger
ones who are growing up with a ubiquitous internet, the view is quite
different. Unlike Hollywood, where it’s clear to anyone that they are watching
an idealised version of reality, with pornography, that realisation is often
absent. For one simple reason: we don’t talk about sexual pleasure as children,
adolescents or adults. It’s a taboo, guilt-ridden area. In the absence of other
options, pornography becomes a de facto way of educating yourself about
sexuality. As one 2014 study of low-income black and Hispanic youth put it, led
by Emily Rothman of the Boston University School of Public Health, quoting an
interview with a porn-watching adolescent: ‘Without porn, I wouldn’t know half
the things I know now.’

The sex researcher
Alice Dreger of Northwestern University in Chicago recently live-tweeted from a
high-school sex-education class – her son’s. His teacher’s approach, it soon
became clear, was absolute avoidance of any topics other than abstinence. Any
attempt to broaden the conversation was stonewalled. And therein lies the
problem. We see pornography as a socially destructive force, but there’s
nothing inherently destructive about it. It becomes so only when it is the one
thing adolescents see as they discover sex: they use it as a learning script.
It’s not a problem of pornography as such, but rather, a problem of the absence
of a competing script, something that contextualises porn as a fantastical, not
real-life, experience.

The way to
change that – and to change the negative effects such a misperception can have
– isn’t to restrict or ban pornography. It’s to bring the discussion of sexual
pleasure to the foreground, especially in sex-ed. ‘We need to supplement
pornography with non-porn sexual education, so that porn becomes fantasy sex
rather than a real-world template,’ Zhana Vrangalova, a psychologist at NYU who
specialises in sexuality, told me. ‘We need to give people permission to enjoy
sex. Until we do that, they will go to porn. Because you can’t kill curiosity.’

Already,
certain movements are trying to do just that. Jessica Cooper helps run
ScrewSmart, a sex-education collaborative in Philadelphia that aims to foster
open dialogue about sexual pleasure. The group meets with students, hosts
workshops, discusses porn and its role openly and honestly. ‘One of the biggest
issues for sexuality in general is permission,’ Cooper told me. ‘People want
permission to like things they like, want what they want. We are giving them
permission to say yes. Your desires are valid, sexuality is important, what you
want to do is not wrong. Porn does that, especially to women. They need to be
told, I’m not an evil, weird creature for enjoying this.’

For some women, erotica is the mythical
Viagra, a way of empowering them

Other
programmes are starting with even younger children – an important step given
the ever-earlier pornography exposure that might otherwise seep through
unexplained. In Norway, Line Jansrud, the presenter of Newton, an
educational show on state TV, gives herself a hickey with a vacuum cleaner,
kisses a tomato and uses a lubricated dildo on an anatomically correct doll
model. She wants to explain how real sex works, so that children and
adolescents can distinguish Hollywood from real life. Her target audience:
third-graders.

The effects
of this social change reach far beyond sexual education as such. ‘We’re missing
important therapeutic effects of using erotica because of taboos,’ Prause says.
‘Aroused states and orgasms do really nice things for the brain and body.’
Erotica can, for some women, be the mythical Viagra that has thus far gone
missing, a way of empowering them and ‘putting their brain in that mode,
helping it do what it’s been programmed to do’. There is certainly a desire for
it, albeit largely unspoken in normal circumstances: when Prause’s group placed
an ad for one of their recent studies, the response broke their phone lines.
They had to take it offline. There is also evidence that the social effects of
watching porn can spread beyond the individual: pornography has been shown to
improve acceptance of homosexuality, birth control and extra-marital sex.

And porn has
the potential to go even further. Sun doesn’t like pornography – but it’s not
actual porn she doesn’t like. It’s the social norms and standards that led to
the creation of certain stereotypes in the first place: not a result of
pornography, but rather a reflection of the direction broader society has
taken. ‘We live in a patriarchy, where women are fundamentally objectified. We
shouldn’t be surprised to see it play out in pornography.’

We shouldn’t
be worrying about whether pornography has negative repercussions on society. We
should be worrying about the kind of society that would lead to the types of
pornography we find distasteful in the first place – and work on fixing that
society rather than blaming its inevitable result.

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Thursday, 30 July 2015

During the past several months as
a slew of draconian vaccine bills have been aggressively pushed upon state legislators to legally enforce
vaccination against Americans freedom of choice, I have had the opportunity to
debate publicly pro-vaccine advocates on a number of occasions. When faced with
a barrage of peer-reviewed scientific facts confirming vaccine failures, and
its lack of efficacy and safety, representatives of the vaccine establishment
will inevitably raise the issue of the eradication of polio and smallpox from
the US as case examples of two vaccine miracles.

Yet in neither case, has there
been scientifically sound confirmation that the demise of these two infectious
diseases were the result of mass population vaccine campaigns.

Furthermore,
this horribly simplistic belief that polio and smallpox are exemplary models for
all other vaccines is both naïve and dangerous. Vaccinology does not
follow a one-size-fits-all theory as the pro-vaccine industry propagates to the
public. For any coherent public debate, it is necessary for each vaccine to be
critically discerned upon its own terms with respect to its rate of efficacy,
the properties of viral infection and immune response, vaccine adverse effects,
and the long term risks that may not present symptoms until years after
inoculation.

This article
is the first part of a two part series to deconstruct the false claims of polio
and smallpox as modern medical success stories and put each in its historical
and scientific perspective. In this first part, the legacy of the polio
vaccine and its ongoing track record of failure, particularly in developing
nations, will be presented.

It is a very
dangerous assumption to believe that any new vaccine or drug to fight an
infectious disease or life-threatening disease will be safe once released upon
an uninformed public. The history of pharmaceutical science is largely a story
of failures as well as successes. Numerous drugs over the decades have been
approved and found more dangerous than the condition being targeted, but only
after hundreds of thousands of people were turned into guinea pigs by the
medical establishment. In the case of vaccines, both the first human
papilloma vaccine (Gardasil) and Paul Offit’s vaccine for rotavirus (Rotateq)
were disasters. Both were fast tracked through the FDA and both failed to live
up to their promises.

This
scenario of fast tracking unsafe and poorly researched vaccines was certainly
the case for one of the first polio vaccines in 1955. In fact the polio vaccine
received FDA approval and licensure after two hours of review – the fastest
approved drug in the FDA’s history. Known as the Cutter Incident, because the
vaccine was manufactured by Cutter Laboratories, within days of vaccination,
40,000 children were left with polio, 200 with severe paralysis and ten
deaths. Shortly thereafter the vaccine was quickly withdrawn from
circulation and abandoned.[1]

The CDC’s
website still promulgates a blatant untruth that the Salk vaccine was a modern
medical success. To the contrary, officials at the National Institutes of
Health were convinced that the vaccine was contributing to a rise in polio and
paralysis cases in the 1950s. In 1957 Edward McBean documented in his
book The Poisoned Needle
that government officials stated the vaccine was “worthless as a preventive and
dangerous to take.” Some states such as Idaho where several people died
after receiving the Salk vaccine, wanted to hold the vaccine makers legally
liable.

Dr. Salk
himself testified in 1976 that his live virus vaccine, which continued to be
distributed in the US until 2000, was the “principal if not sole cause” of all
polio cases in the US since 1961. However, after much lobbying and
political leveraging, private industry seduced the US Public Health Service to
proclaim the vaccine safe.[2] Although this occurred in the 1950s, this
same private industry game plan to coerce and buy off government health
agencies has become epidemic with practically every vaccine brought to market
during the past 50 years.

Today, US
authorities proudly claim the nation is polio-free. Medical authorities and
advocates of mass vaccination raise the polio vaccine as an example of a
vaccine that eradicated a virus and proof of the unfounded “herd immune
theory”. Dr. Suzanne Humphries, a nephrologist and one of today’s most
outspoken medical critics against vaccines has documented thoroughly that
polio’s disappearance was actually a game of smoke and mirrors.[3] By
1961, the polio vaccine should have been ruled a dismal failure and abandoned
since more people were being paralyzed from the vaccines than wild poliovirus
infection.

The 1950s
mark a decade of remarkable medical achievement; it also marked a period of
high scientific naiveté and enthusiastic idealism. Paralysis was not only
associated with polio infections, but also a wide variety of other biologic and
toxic agents: aseptic meningitis, Coxsackie and Echo viruses, arsenic,
DDT and other industrial chemical toxins indiscriminately released upon
millions of Americans. In addition, paralytic conditions were given a
variety of names in an attempt to distinguish them, although some, such
paralysis due to polio, aseptic meningitis and Coxsackie, were
indistinguishable.

One of the
more devious names was Acute Flaccid Paralysis (AFP), a class of paralyses
indistinguishable from the paralysis occurring in thousands within the
vaccinated population. It was therefore incumbent upon health authorities to
transfer polio vaccine-related injuries to non-poliovirus causation in order to
salvage vaccination campaigns and relieve public fears. Dr. Humphries and
her colleagues have noted a direct relationship between the increase in AFP
through 2011 and government claims of declining polio infectious rates parallel
with increased vaccination. [4]

One of the
largest and most devious medical scandals in the history of American medicine
also concerns the polio vaccine. In an excellent history about the polio
vaccine, Neil Miller shares the story of Dr. Bernice Eddy, a scientist at the
NIH who in 1959 “discovered that the polio vaccines being administered
throughout the world contained an infectious agent capable of causing
cancer.” As the story is told, her attempts to warn federal officials
resulted in the removal of her laboratory and being demoted at the
agency.[5] It was only later that one of the nation’s most famous vaccine
developers, Maurice Hilleman at Merck identified the agent as a cancer causing
monkey virus, SV40, common in almost all rhesus monkeys being used to culture
the polio virus for the vaccine.

This
contaminant virus was found in all samples of the Sabin oral polio vaccine
tested. The virus was also being found in Salk’s killed polio injectable
vaccine as well. No one knows for certain how many American’s received
SV40 contaminated vaccines, but some estimates put the figure as high as 100
million people. That was greater than half the US population in 1963 when
the vaccine was removed from the market.

Many
Americans today, and even more around the world, continue to be threatened and
suffer from the legacy of this lethal vaccine. Among some of the more alarming
discoveries since the discovery of the SV40 in Salk’s and Sabin’s vaccines and
its carcinogenic footprint in millions of Americans today are:

58% of mesothelioma cases, a life
threatening lung cancer, had SV40 present

A later analysis of a large
national cancer database found mesotheliomas were 178% higher among those
who received the polio vaccines

A study published in Cancer Research
found SV40 in 23 percent of blood samples taken and 45% of semen samples
studied, thereby confirming that the monkey virus can be sexually
transmitted.[7]

Osteosarcomas are 10 times higher
in states where the polio vaccine contaminated with SV40 was most used,
particularly throughout the Northeastern states [8]

Two 1988 studies published in the
New England Journal of Medicine discovered that SV40 can be passed on to
infants whose mother’s received the SV40 tainted vaccines. Those children
later had a 13 times greater rate of brain tumors compared to children
whose mothers did not receive the polio vaccines. This would also explain
why these childrens’ tumors contained the SV40 virus present, even though
the children themselves did not receive the vaccine. [9]

There is a
very large body of scientific literature detailing the catastrophic
consequences of SV40 virus infection. As of 2001, Neil Miller counted 62
peer-reviewed studies confirming the presence of SV40 in a variety of human
tissues and different carcinomas. Although the killed polio vaccines
administered in developed countries no longer contain the SV40 virus, the oral
vaccine continues to be the vaccine of choice in poor developing countries
because its cost-effectiveness to manufacture. Safety is clearly not a
priority of the drug companies, health agencies and bureaucratic organizations
that push the vaccine on impoverished children.

After almost
sixty years of silence and a federally sanctioned cover up, the CDC finally
admitted several years ago that the Salk and Sabin vaccines indeed were
contaminated with the carcinogenic SV40 monkey virus. [10]

However,
SV40 is not the only contaminate parents should be worried about. As with other
vaccines, such as measles, mumps, influenza, smallpox and others, the viral
component of the vaccine continues to be cultured in animal cell medium. This
medium can contain monkey kidney cells, newborn calf serum, bovine extract and
more recently clostridium tetani, the causative agent for tetanus infection.

All animal
tissue mediums can carry known and unknown pathogenic viruses, bacterial
genetic residues, and foreign DNA fragments that pose countless potential
health risks. Based upon transcripts of CDC meetings on biological
safety, the late medical investigative reporter, Janine Roberts, noted that
vaccine makers and government health officials admit they have no way to
prevent dangerous carcinogenic and autoimmune causative genetic material from
being injected into an infant. Among the unwanted genetic material that might
be found in vaccines today are: cancer-causing oncogenes, bird leukemia
virus, equine arthritic virus, prions (a protein responsible for Mad Cow
Disease and other life threatening illnesses), enzyme reverse transcriptase (a
biological marker associated with HIV infection), and a multitude of extraneous
DNA fragments and contaminates that escape filtration during vaccine
preparation. [11]

The CDC
acknowledges that it is impossible to remove all foreign genetic and viral
material from vaccines. As Janine Roberts noted, the science behind the
manufacture of vaccines is extraordinarily primitive. Therefore, the CDC
sets limits for how much genetic contamination by weight is permitted in a vaccine,
and the agency over the years continues to increase the threshold.[12]

Amidst the
polio vaccine debacle and mounds of scientific literature confirming the
vaccines’ i failure, US health agencies and the most ardent proponents of
vaccines, such as Paul Offit and Bill Gates, retreat into the protected
cloisters of medical denialism and continue to spew folktales of polio
vaccines’ success.

The polio
vaccines on the market have not improved very much during the past 60 years.
They continue to rely upon primitive manufacturing technology and animal
tissue culturing. In recent years Bill Gates’ polio eradication campaigns
in India have been dismal failures. Touted as one of the “most expensive
public health campaigns in history” according to Bloomberg Business, as many as
15 doses of oral polio vaccine failed to immunize the poorest of Indian
children. Severe gastrointestinal damage due to contaminated water and
wretched sanitation conditions have made the vaccine ineffective. Similar
cases have been reported with the rotavirus and cholera vaccine failures in
Brazil, Peru and Bangladesh. According to epidemiologist Nicholas
Grassly at Imperial College London, “ There is increasing evidence that oral
polio failure is the result of exposure to other gut infections.” [13]

There is
another even more frightening consequence of Gates’ vaccine boondoggle launched
upon rural India in 2011. This particular polio vaccine contains an
increased dosage of the polio virus. In the April-June 2012 issue of the Indian
Journal of Medical Ethics, a paper reported the incidence of 47,500 new cases
of what is being termed “non-polio acute flaccid paralysis”, or NPAFP,
following Gates polio campaign.[14] The following year, there were over
53,500 reported cases. NPAFP is clinically indistinguishable from wild polio
paralysis as well as polio vaccine-induced paralysis. The primary
difference is that NPAFP is far more fatal.[15]

Physicians
at New Delhi’s St. Stephens Hospital analyzed national polio surveillance data
and found direct links between the increased dosages of the polio vaccine and
rise in NPAFP. Coincidentally, the two states with the highest number of
cases, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, are also the two states with the worst water
contamination, poverty and highest rates of gastrointestinal diseases reported
by Bloomberg. As early as 1948, during a particularly terrible polio
outbreak in the US, Dr Benjamin Sandler at Oteen Veterans’ Hospital observed
the relationship between polio infection, malnutrition and poor diets relying heavily
on starches. [16] According to nutrition data, white rice, the primary
daily food staple among poorer Indians, has the highest starch content among
all foods.[17]

Despite this
crisis, in January 2014, Bill Gates, the WHO and the Indian government announced
India is today a polio-free nation. [18] Another sleight of hand performance of
the polio vaccine’s magical act.

The case of
India, and subsequent cases in other developing nations, scientifically
supports a claim vaccine opponents have stated for decades; that is, improving
sanitation, providing clean water, healthy food, and the means for better
hygiene practices are the safest and most efficacious measures for fighting
infectious disease. According to statistics compiled by Neil Miller,
Director of ThinkTwice Global Vaccine Institute, the polio death rate had
declined by 47% from 1923 to when the vaccine was introduced in 1953. In
the UK, the rate declined 55% and similar rates were observed in other European
countries.[19]

Many
historians of science, such as Robert Johnson at the University of Illinois,
agree that the decrease in polio and other infectious diseases during the first
half of the twentieth century were largely the result of concerted national
public health efforts to improve sanitation and public water systems, crowded
factory conditions, better hygienic food processing, and new advances in
medicine and health care. Relying upon the unfounded myth that vaccines
are a magic bullet to protect a population suffering from extreme conditions of
poverty, while failing to improve these populations’ living standards, is a
no-win scenario. Vaccines will continue to fail and further endanger the
millions of children’s health with severely impaired immune systems with high
levels of vaccines’ infectious agents and other toxic ingredients.

A further
question that has arisen in recent years is whether or not a new more deadly
polio virus has begun to merge as a result of over-vaccination. Last
year, researchers at the University of Bonn isolated a new strain of polio
virus that evades vaccine protection. During a 2010 polio outbreak in a
vaccinated region of the Congo, there were 445 cases of polio paralysis and 209
deaths. [20] This is only the most recent report of polio virus strains’ mutation
that calls the entire medical edifice of the vaccine’s efficacy into
question.

One of the
first discoveries of the vaccine contributing to the rise of new polio strains
was reported by the Institut Pasteur in 1993. Dr. Crainic at the Institut
proved that if you vaccine a person with 3 strains of poliovirus, a fourth
strain will emerge and therefore the vaccine itself is contributing to
recombinant activity between strains.

Moreover,
since the poliovirus is excreted through a persons GI system, it is commonly
present in sewage and then water sources. In 200, Japanese scientists
discovered a new infectious polio strain in rivers and sewage near Tokyo.
After genetic sequencing, the novel mutation was able to be traced back to the
polio vaccine. Additional vaccine-derived polio strains have also been
identified in Egypt, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.[21]

Therefore,
the emergence of new polio strains due to over-vaccination is predictable.
Similar developments are being discovered with a new pertussis strain that
evades the current DPT vaccines. For this reason, there has been an
increase in whooping cough outbreaks among fully vaccinated children.
Influenza viruses regularly mutate and evade current flu vaccines. The
measles vaccine is becoming less and less effective, and again measles
outbreaks are occurring among some of the most highly vaccinated populations.

As with the
failure of antibiotics because of their over-reliance to fight infections,
researchers are now more readily willing to entertain the likelihood that
massive vaccination campaigns are contributing to the emergence of new, more
deadly viral strains impervious to current vaccines.

Currently,
federal agencies review the vaccine science, reinterpret the evidence as it
sees fit, and are not held accountable for its misinformation and blatant
denialism that threatens the health of countless children at the cost of tens
of billions of dollars. Vaccine policies are driven by committees that govern
vaccine scheduling and everyone is biased with deep conflict of interests with
the private vaccine makers. Even if a person were to make the wild assumption
that polio vaccines were responsible for the eradication of polio infection in
the US, what has been the trade off? According to the American Cancer
Society, in 2013 over 1.6 million Americans will be diagnosed with cancer.
Twenty-four million Americans have autoimmune diseases. How many of these
may be related to the polio and other vaccines? As we have detailed, In
the case of the polio vaccine the evidence is extremely high that an infectious
disease, believe to have been eliminated from the US, continues ravage the
lives of polio vaccine recipients. Nevertheless it can no longer be disputed
that the polio vaccine’s devastating aftermath raises a serious question that
American health officials and vaccine companies are fearful to have answered.

Right now
they “right” the papers, interpret them and are not held accountable if they
are wrong. Policies driven by committees governing scheduling and all
biased with conflict of interest.

The
CDC Made These Two Radical Changes and 30,000 Diagnoses of Polio Instantly
Disappeared

The graph is from the
Ratner report (1), the transcript of a 1960 panel sponsored by the Illinois
Medical Society, on which sat three PhD statisticians and an MD, met to
discuss the problems with the ongoing polio vaccination campaign.

The polio
vaccine was licensed in the U.S. in 1954. From ‘50 thru ‘55, the striped and clear
portions of the bars represent about 85% of the reported cases, or 30,000 per
year, on average. Those cases were automatically eliminated by two radical changes
the CDC made to the diagnostic parameters and labeling protocol of the disease
as soon as the vaccine was licensed – 30,000 cases a year we were subsequently
told were eliminated by the vaccine.

That
success, held aloft as a banner of the industry, is an illusion. The CDC has an
awesome power of control over public perception, sculpting it from behind
closed doors in Atlanta, with the point of a pen.

Over the
last sixty years in the U.S., more than a million cases of what would have been
diagnosed as polio pre-vaccine – same symptoms - were given different labels.

The change
didn’t stop there, however. As addressed in the Ratner report, they also
changed the definition of a polio epidemic, greatly reducing the likelihood
that any subsequent outbreaks would be so labeled – as though the severity, or
noteworthiness, of paralytic polio had halved, overnight. It’s summed up thusly
in the report:

Presently
[1960], a community is considered to have an epidemic when it has 35 cases of
polio per year per 100,000 population. Prior to the introduction of the Salk
vaccine the National Foundation defined an epidemic as 20 or more cases of
polio per year per 100,000 population. On this basis there were many epidemics
throughout the United States yearly. The present higher rate has resulted in
not a real, but a semantic elimination of epidemics.

And that’s
precisely what happened to polio: not a real, but a semantic elimination of the
disease.

In the
decades following the release of the vaccine, additional changes were made to
the diagnostic parameters of the disease, changes involving analysis of
cerebrospinal fluid and stool and additional testing (2) , each succeeding
change making it less and less likely that a diagnosis of paralytic polio would
result.

And,
critically, before the vaccine was licensed polio diagnoses were made
clinically and accepted from around the nation, duly reported to the American
public annually as polio, no lab analysis required, while after it was licensed
only the CDC was – and is - allowed to issue confirmations of paralytic polio –
all suspected cases had to be sent to them for analysis and testing. (3)

Again,
perception is key. Because of the persistent pre-vaccine news coverage of the
disease, including film footage of paralytic polio victims in leg braces, or
immobilized, strapped to huge, inclined boards, or housed in foreboding iron
lungs, the public pictured the thousands of kids reported with polio each year
as suffering terribly, when in truth the pictures involved only a fraction of a
percent of the diagnosed cases.

Moreover,
while for many the perception was that the iron lung was a permanent fixture,
in the majority of cases the machine was needed only temporarily – generally
about one to two weeks. (4)

The
arbitrariness of the change in the diagnostic parameter of paralytic polio,
from one day of paralysis to two months, resulting specifically in the
elimination of all the cases represented by the striped portions of the bars in
the graph, is remarkable. Indeed, the very idea that the length of time you’re
ill determines the disease is remarkable!, and flies in the face of the science
of virology.

Were you to
apply the same logic to measles diagnostics, for instance, and add the
requirement of a rash that lasts ten days, the disease would be eradicated,
since the measles rash lasts from three to five days. To the point, had they
made the requirement three months of paralysis instead of two, several
additional thousands of cases of paralytic polio would simply and immediately
have fallen off the diagnostic plate, hastening the illusion of complete
eradication.

All of the
non-paralytic cases, represented by the clear portions of the bars in the
graph, and which pre-vaccine were the majority
of cases reported simply
as polio each year, were discarded completely!, reclassified. A
search through public health department disease statistics reveals that in the
U.S. those cases were basically handled as they were in Canada:

It may
be noted that the Dominion Council of Health at its 74th meeting in October
1958 recommended that for the purposes of national reporting and statistics the
term non-paralytic poliomyelitis be replaced by ‘meningitis, viral or aseptic’
with the specific viruses shown where known. (5)

The current
non-use of the iron lung is often pointed out by vaccine proponents as proof of
the success of the polio vaccine, but that, too, is an illusion; years ago it
was replaced by much smaller, portable respirators, some body worn, some
bedside – and much in use today.

You’ve gotta
give ‘em credit for the hubris. Vaccine proponents will actually cite the fact
that many illnesses were misdiagnosed as polio pre-vaccine, attempting to
explain why the changes following its licensing were necessary, not necessarily
nefarious. But as always, perception is the key, as in any magic act, and the
CDC on its website continues to forward the illusion they themselves created:

How common was
polio in the United States?

Polio
was one of the most dreaded childhood diseases of the 20th century in the
United States. [Periodic epidemics increased] in size and frequency in the late
1940s and early 1950s. An average of over 35,000 cases were reported during
this time period. With the introduction of Salk inactivated poliovirus vaccine
(IPV) in 1955, the number of cases rapidly declined to under 2,500 cases in
1957. By 1965, only 61 cases of paralytic polio were reported. (6)

In reality,
the charade was continuing right on schedule: Of the ‘35,000 cases of polio
reported on average in the late 1940s and early 1950s’, only 15,000 were
paralytic – the reduction to 2,500 cases of paralytic polio in 1957, and the
complete disappearance of all the non-paralytic cases, was a direct result of
the diagnostic changes. It’s smoke ‘n mirrors.

There are a
few more puzzle pieces which help complete the picture, the unavoidably
undeniable pattern, of conscious, purposeful manipulation of statistics:

In the 90s,
“polio eradication initiatives” were implemented in India and Africa. The WHO
quickly established the same diagnostic changes in those nations as were made
in the U.S. in 1955. The result, as expected, was the announcement two years
ago that India is now polio free. What the WHO so conveniently omitted was any
mention of the skyrocketing incidence, in both nations, of acute flaccid
paralysis (7) , clinically identical to polio, and following in the wake of the
use of the oral polio vaccine, abandoned fifteen years ago in the U.S. because
it triggers Vaccine Associated Paralytic Polio:

To
eliminate the risk of vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis (VAPP), as of
January 1, 2000, OPV was no longer recommended for routine immunization in the
United States.(8)

As you can see,
the incidence of acute flaccid paralysis quickly soared to tens of thousands,
far surpassing the 1996 incidence of polio.

Midst the
labeling deceptions lies another insidious character trait of the vaccine
industry. During the polio epidemics in the 40s and 50s in the U.S., one
doctor, Fred Klenner, MD, cured every one of the sixty polio patients he
treated, some of them paralyzed, using massive injections of vitamin C.
Astoundingly, after summarizing his work, his success, at the annual AMA
meeting in 1949, Dr. Klenner received neither questions nor comment from his
colleagues, and no mention of it was ever made to the American public. (9)

The nut: the
eradication of polio is a total sham, an example of trust misplaced, of power
and control run amok. It’s indicative of every aspect of the vaccination
paradigm, propelled by a baseless, industry-constructed fear of infectious
disease, statistical manipulation and withholding of critical information, and
sustained, ironically, by the very and insidious nature of vaccine injury, the
bulk of which displays temporally well divorced from the act of the
vaccination, obfuscating causal relation.

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